Kaikoura to Wellington

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We get up, have breakfast in our room and walk down to the bus stop with all our baggage. It is a nice day with beautiful scenery around the roadway between the mountains and the sea. The beaches in this area are all grey river rock, not sand. As we drive toward Picton, the landscape has changed from the lush green hills a few months ago to a brilliant summer gold color. We drive into the Awatere Valley where the Marlborough wine country begins and past several vineyards before we reach Picton. We are dropped off at the ferry terminal, check our bags and board the ferry for Wellington. I am glad we have nice weather because we are aware that the four-hour ferry crossing can be miserable if the sea swells are high. We have lunch on the ferry and sit back for an uneventful crossing of Cook Strait. We arrive in Wellington and the wind is blowing fiercely. We aren’t sure how far our hotel is from the ferry terminal so we catch a cab. As it turns out the cab fare is only $8NZ and the walk would have been too far with all our bags. We go to our room at the hotel to find that it is really hot. Most hotels and motels in NZ don’t have air conditioning and there isn’t much breeze in the room as buildings surround it. I call down to the front desk and they have a fan brought up to our room, which helps immensely.
I call Luke’s friend, Todd, and we arrange to meet tomorrow night to go to his house for a typical Kiwi barbecue dinner. He and his wife, Fiona, live in the Wellington suburb of Crofton Downs. They own a restaurant they bought a year ago and have immigrated to NZ to settle down and start a family after spending the past ten years traveling the world.
We decide it is cooler on the street so we decide to walk around a bit and find someplace to eat dinner. We find a nice little Turkish restaurant and have dinner then walk back to our hotel. The room has cooled down considerably for the night.

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